Relevance and Lived Experience

We often are told that what we teach should be relevant. To many, this is interpreted as a need to link newly taught content to previous content. Or, that content should be couched in terms of how it relates to the rest of our discipline. I used to teach about concepts of lactation biology. I would stand in front of class and use a cow’s udder as my example of those some of those concepts. After awhile, I realized that the large majority of my students have never seen a cow’s udder first hand, never milked a cow, and never touched a cow’s udder. Using the image of a cow’s udder to help them understand a lactation concept is about as helpful as using a word to define itself. The realization of the lack of personal knowledge (experience) about the animals that our animal sciences students are studying lead us to develop a hands-on course where students work directly with the animals. Many do learn to milk a cow. Now when they come into my upper-level course they at least have a rudimentary personal knowledge of the animal. But, to accomplish this we had to design a new course, yet another course. There must be other ways to integrate relevance.

Students also tell us that they want to know how the things we teach are relevant. Here again, we often misinterpret their request in terms of how something is relevant to the rest of the discipline of study. We must keep in mind that our undergraduates are novices in our discipline. That is why they are in our classes in the first place. As novices, they do not have a sound basis to understand the broader organization and interrelationships among the many parts of our discipline. They do not have a sound basis to define the relative importance of specific content or linkages among components of the content.

Are students asking us how our content relates to them personally when they ask us how is it relevant? That is, “What’s this got to do with me?” Our discussions about the inquiry process, specifically the ASK phase, relate to this question. If the effectiveness of purposefully employing the inquiry process in student learning is in part based on ASK (arising from the student’s lived experience), then their learning something new is most effective when it has personal meaning related to and relevant to their lived experience. Relevance of what is being taught should be couched in terms of how does that content relate to the student’s lived experience. Often that is not easy to do. How can we pull that off? Our animal handling class is a one example where the students are gaining some rudimentary lived experiences under our guidance. Those experiences could be capitalized on in other courses, assuming we were organized enough to do that. That approach probably is not applicable to all disciplines.

One of our challenges in this Faculty Learning Community is to gain a deeper understanding of the concepts underlying the inquiry process so that we may develop other effective means of accounting for our students’ lived experiences, of adding to those lived experiences (hands-on courses, research projects, community-based projects, international experiences, etc), and of capitalizing on those experiences in our own courses or in other courses in our curricula.

The Kalita Connection

Those participating in the recent discussions of this Faculty Learning Community have heard several times about the outstanding accomplishments of Prasanta Kalita's students. Here is a website that talks a bit about them and their winning the EPA competition:

Illinois team is a winner in EPA competition

Congratulations Prasanta and students.

Re: On Failing, Ambiguity, and the Real World

Judy - I'm responding as a economist, though I think the response likely works reasonably well for many other disciplines.

Microeconomics is a metaphor. There is a methodology in applying the metaphor correctly. It is a methodology that can be applied to many open ended and ambiguous situations. There is not applying the methodology at all and claiming to do so (a lot of people talking about cost are under the mistaken impression they are talking economics, but they don't distinguish between outlays and opportunity costs), there is applying the methodology but doing so in a poor fashion (the economic analysis is done in a low quality way with some of the inferences clearly incorrect), and then there is a correct analysis done carefully. Even with the third, however, there may be ambiguity about whether the economic model fits the situation being analyzed. People can disagree about that even with a good analysis.

So, to address your question, I think we need to teach methodology and get students to understand what is good practice in analysis according to the discipline. They need to understand that applying a discipline gives some insight into the issues they want to work on, but it won't answer every question they might have. I do think there is right and wrong in applying a discipline and students should learn a sense of taste in terms of what a good analysis looks like. This doesn't preclude ambiguity. But it does get them past the point where everything is up for grabs and any approach to answering the question is as good as any other.

On Failing, Ambiguity, and the Real World

The contemporary techno-global environment tends to reward innovation along with the ability to grow, learn, and accommodate change. One of the benefits of inquiry learning is the way “floundering” prepares students for the world after college. In the real world answers are really just impermanent possibilities with a variety of potential consequences.

During college students are supposed to acquire knowledge that prepares them to be self-supporting and productive citizens, but there is no certainty that information learned today will translate into skills useful tomorrow. The ability to think, reflect and understand ourselves in relation to others and the world at large are more enduring proficiencies.

Living with ambiguity is uncomfortable. Humans tend to prefer constancy. It is reassuring to have the right answers, but living with contradiction is so much more interesting. Avid learners have an appetite for chaos. In the modern world isn’t it more useful to let students learn how to discover interesting questions rather than teach correct answers?

Financial Resources for undergraduates in inquiry..

Walt asked me to put the list fo resources that was available for my undergraduates in research/ inquiry-based learning. I listed those on the board last Wednesday (10/3/07), and here it goes:
Department
College academic programs
College study abroad programs
College design council
Campus Environmental Council
Campus NSF-funded WaterCampws program
Regional Water Environment Associations
Federal grants - US-EPA, US-DOD, USDA
Private organizations
Water Environment Federation

I know finding dollars to engage undergraduares in research in some disciplines can be very challenging, however, sometimes approaching the unit heads or academic deans can help in getting those resources needed.

What we thought about inquiry

Below is a list of words and phrases that our FLC associated with inquiry as of the initial weekly meeting (Sept. 19, 2007). These have been sorted across three general themes. We will see if and how our vision of inquiry changes over the semester.

Developmental:
- way of looking at the world
- intellectual development
- finding out for yourself
- making a pain of myself

Discovery:
- curiosity
- investigation
- exploration
- engagement
- research
- reflection
- observation

Questioning:
- asking questions
- new knowledge
- what, why, how
- answers
- get information
- problem solving

[Thanks, Judy for sorting these into themes.]

Alternative Approaches to Inquiry

Walt - I thought it would help to push these out so we might hang our hat on a different peg, if we so choose. These are overlapping, but with different emphasis.

The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schon - The buzzwords are knowing in action and learning in action. There is emphasis on the indiosyncrasy in the situation to which learning is applied. Thus, even if one "knows the theory" there is still art to applying the theory to the particular situation. Knowledge a la Schon is represented as an unfolding - more and more is brought to bear to match what the practitioner knows about the particular situation. The Schon approach is associated with an apprenticeship model of teaching and learning and where rather than doing experiments students design things as the way to learn. But it has also been applied to fields like psychology, where what is designed is a diagnosis of a patient.

Effortful Study, Anders Ericcson - This is associated with performance as in playing a musical instrument or a game of chess. Effortful study emphasizes doing particular tasks that are not endpoints in themselves but that produce greater understanding and the sequencing of the tasks in a way that produces rapid learning. Effortful study is associated with precocious behavior in youth and approaches to instruction such as the Suzuki Method. There is the question of whether prodigious behavior in one domain can be transferred to other domains but, not doubt, effortful study is tied to what we mean by learning to learn skills.

Process Approach to Writing - The entire idea is to emphasize writing as a means for the writer to learn. This is very much tied up with producing narrative to tie ideas together and see if the narrative "makes sense." There is a discovery process in the writing, discovery in the sense of new realizations by the writer, and that writing is done to improve the writer's understanding.

With each of these the notion of *failure* needs to be understood as should ways in which we validate success or failure. So I hope during the course of our discussion we talk about validation. For now, I'd say that a failure is a complete dead end from which the learner needs to back track to make progress. Otherwise, what we have been referring to as failure may be a useful stepping stone, even if it is not the final product.